Barbara Pfeiler

National Autonomous University of Mexico | UNAM · Centro Peninsular en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales

Numeral classifiers in Yucatec Maya are subject to two processes of language change that create variation in the contemporary language. The first process is the use of a general classifier instead of specific sortal classifiers. The second process is the use of the general classifier along with mensural classifiers. Our study examines the microvari...

This article explores the role of the reportative BIN in Yucatec Maya language acquisition and socialization among children aged 4 years and above, focusing on their interactions during pretend play. Building upon prior research on caregivers’ strategic use of BIN, the study aims to elucidate the nuanced meanings and functions of the reportative in...

Linguistic variation in space reflects patterns of social interaction. Gravity models have been successfully used to capture the role of urban centers in the dissemination of innovations in the speech community along with the diffusion of variants in space. Crucially, the effects of the factors of a gravity model (distance and population size) depe...

Caretakers tend to repeat themselves when speaking to children, either to clarify their message or to redirect wandering attention. This repetition also appears to support language learning. For example, words that are heard more frequently tend to be produced earlier by young children. However, pure repetition only goes so far; some variation betw...

This study shows the reconstruction of the proto-Mayan language acquisition by using the comparative method. Linguists have used the comparative method for over a hundred years to reconstruct the history of languages and linguistic families around the world. The analysis of the infant speech of six Mayan languages compares the children's phonologic...

This study shows the reconstruction of the proto-Mayan language acquisition by using the comparative method. Linguists have used the comparative method for over a hundred years to reconstruct the history of languages and linguistic families around the world. The analysis of the infant speech of six Mayan languages compares the children’s phonologic...

The study used naturalistic data on the production of nominal prefixes in the Otopamean language Northern Pame (autonym: Xi'iuy) to test Whole Word (constructivist) and Minimal Word (prosodic) theories for the acquisition of inflection. Whole Word theories assume that children store words in their entirety; Minimal Word theories assume that childre...

We use the comparative method of language acquisition research in this article to investigate children’s expression of directional clitics in two Eastern Mayan languages – K’iche’ and Mam (Pye and Pfeiler, 2014; Pye, 2017). The comparative method in historical linguistics reconstructs the grammatical antecedents of modern languages and traces the e...

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions Northern Pame (autonym: Xi’iuy) is an Otopamean language situated in the Mexican state of San Luís Potosí. Today over 90% of the Pame population speaks Spanish, and two-year-old children only speak Northern Pame in two Northern Pame villages. The paper explores differences in two-year-old Pame children...

How does a child map words to grammatical categories when words are not overtly marked either lexically or prosodically? Recent language acquisition theories have proposed that distributional information encoded in sequences of words or morphemes might play a central role in forming grammatical classes. To test this proposal, we analyze child-direc...

REVIEW of RODRÍGUEZ OCHOA, PATRICIA & GÓMEZ MARÍN, EDGAR & CERDA GONZÁLEZ, MYRIAM (eds.). 1999. Compendio Xcaret de la escritura jeroglífica maya descifrada por Yuri V. Knórosov. México: Universidad de Quintana Roo y Promotora Xcaret. Tomos I, II, III, 650 pp.

This book presents a collection of chapters on the nature, flexibility and acquisition of lexical categories. These long-debated issues are looked at anew by exploring the hypothesis of lexical polycategoriality –according to which lexical forms are not fully, or univocally, specified for lexical category– in a wide number of unrelated languages, a...

As any quick survey of the syntactic literature will show, there are almost as many different views of ergativity as there are so-called ergative languages (languages whose basic clause structure instantiates an ergative case-marking or agreement pattern). While ergativity is sometimes referred to as a typological characteristic of languages, resea...

This paper uses the methods of consonant inventories and discriminant analysis to examine the variation in word-initial consonants produced by 24 children acquiring six Mayan languages. The range of variation in the consonants that children produce has significant implications for theories that predict children follow universal processes of consona...

Presentamos los datos de las formas tempranas de negación en tres lenguas mayas (k’iche’, yucateco y q’anjob’al). Estas lenguas marcan diferentes contrastes entre los contextos de negación discursiva, oracional y existencial. La negación en estas lenguas también interactúa con el aspecto y la modalidad. Los niños que adquieren la lengua k’iche’ usa...

The aim of this study was to apply a comparative method to the analysis of the acquisition of subject person marking in two typological different languages, Croatian and Yucatec Maya. Since no equivalent target entities have been identified in these languages, the comparison is based on surface features of person verb marking, such as suffixation a...

se está perdiendo porque los viejos se están muriendo y ya no hay quien les hable y enseñe la maya [a los hijos], entonces se va a olvidar porque nadie la va a saber hablar... Juan Ek (Kanasín, 2009)

As rich as the development of the Spanish and Portuguese language has been in Latin America, no single book has attempted to chart their complex history. Gathering essays by sociohistorical linguists working across the region, Salikoko S. Mufwene does just that in this book. Exploring the many different contact points between Iberian colonialism an...

ABSTRACT This article demonstrates how the Comparative Method can be applied to cross-linguistic research on language acquisition. The Comparative Method provides a systematic procedure for organizing and interpreting acquisition data from different languages. The Comparative Method controls for cross-linguistic differences at all levels of the gra...

PLANTEAMIENTOS METODOLÓGICOS INTERDISCIPLINARIOS Una colección de capítulos enfocados en elaborar, analizar y discutir la metodología que se implementa y aplica para estudiar temas diversos.

En los censos oficiales se considera que Yucatán es el estado mexicano con el mayor grado de bilingüismo. No existe un solo municipio en Yucatán en el cual no se use el maya-yucateco. Pero al tomar en cuenta la política lingüística histórica y actual, la situación lingüística en Yucatán esta caracterizada por el fenómeno "diglosia con bilingüismo (...

Syncretism has been a profound influence on Guatemalan society of which it has been a part since early Spanish colonization in the 16th Century. Both the incorporation and application of Spanish borrowings, as well as notions of Catholic doctrine in ritual Kaqchikel speech can be seen as a permanent process of religious, cultural, economic and soci...

This paper presents results of a comparative project documenting the development of verbal agreement inflections in children learning four different Mayan languages: K’iche’, Tzeltal, Tzotzil, and Yukatek. These languages have similar inflectional paradigms: they have a generally agglutinative morphology, with transitive verbs obligatorily marked w...

This book includes six studies on the acquisition of single Mesoamerican indigenous languages, (Huichol, Zapotec, and the Mayan languages Ch'ol, Tzeltal, K'iche', and Yukatek); and a crosslinguistic study of five Mayan languages (K'anjob'al, K'iche', Tzeltal, Tzotzil, and Yukatek). Three topics are theoretically and methodologically discussed and e...

This chapter explains the use of Maya and Spanish in Mayan extended families. Who speaks with whom what language?

CHAKANPUTUN Y CHAMPOTON EN LA HISTORIA E HISTORIOGRAFÍA DE YUCATÁN El propósito del presente estudio es el análisis de procedentes de documentos históricos relativos a lolos datos s topónimos Chakanputun y Champoton. Se considera que ambos lugares juegan un papel clave en la historia de Yucatán previo a la conquista española. En la historiografía d...

El estudio propone una comparación de la adquisición de los nombres y de los verbos en dos lenguas tipológicamente diferentes, el croata y el maya yucateco. No obstante que la primera es una lengua altamente flexiva y la segunda, aglutinante, ambas muestran similitudes en el orden de adquisición. Los verbos son usados en una edad temprana, y no se...

This paper compares the acquisition of verb morphology in five Mayan languages, using a comparative method based on historical linguistics to establish precise equivalences between linguistic categories in the five languages. Earlier work on the acquisition of these languages, based on examination of longitudinal samples of naturally-occuring child...

Por primera vez en los estudios lingüísticos del maya yucateco se realiza una investigación sistemática sobre la variación moderna de ese idioma, hablado en la península de Yucatán. A pesar de ser considerada la lengua más homogénea entre aquellas de la familia lingüística maya, los resultados aquí presentados muestran tendencias en la distribución...

The purpose of this study is to show the processes and strategies employed by one Yucatecan child, Sandi, in the acquisition of verb morphology leading to the building of three-member inflectional paradigms. Data presented here were gathered during a period of eight months, from Sandi's age of 1;9 to 2;4. We will trace her acquisition of the verbal...

Se reseñó el libro: Sprachkontakt, ethnische Identität und Identitätsbeschädigung. Aspekte der Assimilation der Otomí-Indianer an die hispanophone mexikanische Kultur.